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Monday, October 10, 2016

Book by Che’s Grandson Dissects Bowels of Cuban Reality

14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, 9 October 2016 — "The whole country is a
broken record" says Canek Sanchez Guevara, grandson of Ernesto 'Che'
Guevara, on one of the pages of his book 33 Revolutions published
posthumously in France this year and recently published under the
imprint of Alfaguara. The volume takes a hard look at the Cuban
Revolution and the everyday life of the island, where the writer
immersed himself after spending his early childhood in Italy, Spain and
Mexico.

At the age of 12, Ernesto Guevara's grandson, son of his eldest daughter
Hilda, arrived in his native country and came face to face with a very
different reality from what he had imagined in the cradle of an iconic
leftist family." Every day is a repetition of the previous one, every
week, month, year; and in the endless repetition the sound is degraded
until all that is left is a vague and irreconcilable remembrance of the
original audio," he wrote.

Canek couldn't imagine, on arriving on the island, that he was coming to
a reality on the verge of abrupt change. In the far off Soviet Union,
Mikhail Gorbachev was consolidating Perestroika, while Fidel Castro was
arguing for the defensive move of a "rectification of errors and
negative tendencies" in which agricultural markets were demonized, and
calling to not "build socialism with capitalist measures."

The guerrilla's grandson found a country in which "nothing works but it
doesn't matter," as he described in the pages in 33 Revolutions. This
clash between the propaganda and the life on the streets fills the book
that he worked on for more than a decade and that only saw the light of
day after his premature death, at age 40 due to complications from heart
surgery.

A friend of designers, admirer of some songwriters who didn't even
appear in state venues, and immersed deeply in Havana's nightlife, Canek
was a rare specimen of a "daddy's boy." If in the clans of the
comandantes, the generals and the high officials, everyone focused on
getting the greatest perks, the scion of Che's daughter preferred the
shadows, making every effort to pass unnoticed.

He was born in Havana in 1974 and was the fruit of the union of Hilda
Guevara Gadea and the Mexican Alberto Sánchez Hernández, a young man
from Monterrey who was active in the Armed Communists League and who
came to the island after hijacking a plane. Many friends would later
joke with Canek about the fact of rebellion being written in his genes…
but Cuba was no longer territory for rebels.

Instead of joining the official choir, the grandson of Che honored his
name, which in the Mayan language means "Black Snake," and slipped
silently and without deceit through a Cuba where every door opened at
the mere mention of his grandfather's name. To the powerful, of course,
they didn't like this young man's fascination with "the underworld," and
with ordinary people without military rank nor biographical feats.

The stories told in 33 Revolutions distill much of what the author
confessed in an earlier autobiographical text, dated 2006: "Living in
Cuba: I loved and hated as only you can love and hate something
valuable, something that is a fundamental part of you." He would live
through the most difficult years of the Special Period on the island,
witness the 1994 Rafter Crisis and in 1996 decided to move to Oaxaca,
Mexico, where he performed most of his work as a writer, designer and
cultural promoter.

Years later, he explained that his departure from Cuba was largely due
to "the criminalization of difference," which took place in his native
country, especially the "persecution of homosexuals, hippies,
freethinkers, trade unionists and poets," and the enthronement of the
"socialist bourgeoisie (…) fake proletariats," to which he did not want
to belong nor contribute.

This October, the news of the appearance of his book from a Spanish
publisher promises to tarnish the hypocrites of the official tributes,
who honor his grandfather in Cuba on the occasion of his death on
October 9, 1967. The headlines of the official press repeat over and
over, ameliorated by the news of hurricane Matthew, the old formulas of
"heroic guerrilla" and champion of freedom, which they awarded Guevara
de la Serna, "el Che."

However, it's enough to walk the streets of Old Havana to see Canek's
Grandpa turned into a tourist fetish, his face stamped on every shirt,
ashtray or fake piece of primitive art — memories and dreams for
sale. In each bar filled with Americans is heard the chorus, "here it is
clear, the treasured transparency of your beloved presence Comandante
Che Guevara, remains," which brings applause and tips, many tips.

It is the musical band of the failure of Utopia. Tired chords repeated
over and over again and that the grandson of the controversial guerrilla
collects aptly in his book, where the life in Cuba of Fidel Castro was
never more than that: "A scratched and dirty record. Millions of
scratched and dirty records. His whole life life is a scratched and
dirty record. Repetition after repetition, the record scratched by time
and filth."

Site manager's note: 33 Revolutions is available in English for
pre-order; it will be released in 2 days on 11 October 2016.